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Tag: social media

  • Advanced Social Media Strategy @ GA Saturday 1-4PM

    This Saturday, I’ll be teaching a half-day class at General Assembly at Ponce City Market. This class is Advanced Social Media Strategies, which I’ve taught a few times before, and it’s always a fun class to teach. The class will be from 1-4PM, and here’s a high level look at what we’ll be covering.

    • UNDERSTANDING of what exactly social media marketing is. Hint: it’s content marketing.
    • STRATEGY always begins with your brand, and then your audience. Everything else is window dressing.
    • CHANNELS or which social media networks (e.g., Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) you utilize are governed by one thing, and one thing only. Hint: it’s not the channel that you are most comfortable with. There are best practices for every channel, but everything is still so new that experiments are highly recommended.
    • ENGAGEMENT is more than what you think, and you can have full on engagement without ever making a single post.
    • CALENDAR is your best friend and worst enemy, because nothing hurts like a date, but everyone loves a plan once it’s in place.
    • MEASUREMENT is your only means of seeing if you were right in any or all of your experiments.

    If you’re using social media to market your business, and you need to take your game to the next level, this is the class for you.

    And, yes, this is a complete and total shameless plug for the class I’m teaching. Also, it’s going to be dreadfully hot on Saturday afternoon, so take advantage of a beautiful morning in Atlanta, and then spend the afternoon in air conditioned comfort, learning how you can make a big difference on Monday.

  • How to Measure Social Media ROI

    Cross-posted from the General Assembly blog.
    Using social media to market your business is something every business should do; however, despite what some may think, social media is not free. There’s at least a minimum investment that you have to make, even if it’s just your time, existing knowledge, and ability. When there’s an investment in the business, it becomes necessary to measure the return you’re getting on that investment, your ROI.
    But how do you measure the ROI of social media? Well, the math is the same as any other ROI calculation:
    ROI = (RETURN – INVESTMENT) / INVESTMENT
    The math, the calculation, is easy. Defining “return” and “investment” are the hard parts. Here are 7 variables to consider when measuring, proving, and defending the ROI on your social media investment.
    1. CONTENT IS KING
    What content will you be sharing via your social media channels? Kabbage, the largest online small business lender, recommends, “First and foremost, you should have a blog on your site where you create compelling content.” Buffer, the social media sharing software tool maker,
    Buffer, the social media sharing software tool maker, backed up Kabbage’s statement with this: “Ninety percent of our social media updates are based on content we’ve written on the blog.” OK, so you’ll need a blog, which will cost something – usually someone’s time – to set up, and then someone must create regular compelling content for that blog, either an employee, freelance writer, or an agency. Content is an investment.
    2. CHANNEL YOUR FOCUS
    What social media channels will you use to share this content? You may have to do some research to determine where your target audience is, and they may be on more than one social channel. The research to learn this fact will take someone’s time. There’s another investment.
    3. START WITH A GOAL
    Every organization has goals, and the goals for social media should flow from within the organization’s goals and brand. If you have goals, that means you’re doing this particular exercise for a reason, and that reason is not just “so we’ll be present on social media.” Your goals for social media should support the organization’s business goals, which are usually focused on revenue, costs, brand, and product. If you don’t have goals, then you really need to ask yourself why you are being paid to handle social media for your company. You are an investment.
    4. TRACK YOUR CAMPAIGNS
    If you don’t track it, you can’t measure it. If you don’t measure it, you cannot manage or change it, which is to say you cannot improve it. To track social media, by which I mean track how your social media followers are interacting with your content, you should use Google URL Builder and some form of URL shortener (goo.gl, bit.ly, ow.ly, etc., or a custom URL shortener). Google URL Builder enables you to use UTM parameters to perfectly and clearly identify exactly where the link was and why it was there when your audience clicked it and where your audience landed when they clicked on your URL. You’ll need to store these URLs in a simple spreadsheet or in your CRM for each campaign.
    5. MEASURE YOUR EFFORTS
    Each campaign should have its own ROI. Measuring involves tracking each campaign from conception to completion, from blog content to social media post to click through to lead generation to customer conversion to revenue. Each campaign should be tracked all the way through the marketing funnel or the AARRR process. Google Analytics is free, but it will take time to learn and master, and it will cost you something – time, favors, or money – to get your website properly setup to track and measure every engagement in every campaign within Google Analytics. Tools likeBuffer enable you to automatically add campaign tracking to every post.
    6. ASSIGN VALUE
    Over time, you will be able to establish and assign a value to each social media interaction, such as a follower on Twitter. For example, if you have 1,000 followers, and you send out a tweet with a clear call to action (CTA), you will earn a certain amount of impressions organically for that tweet. Some percentage of your audience will click on your CTA. Some percentage who clicked on the CTA will become leads, and some leads will convert into sales. The math (from this example) is easy: the value of a follower is derived by dividing the revenue from a specific campaign by the number of followers. This is a simple example, but it works for establishing a basic value of one follower. In other words, that value is the most you should be willing to pay to earn one follower if you invest in a paid ad on Twitter to boost followers.
    7. DRIVE REVENUE
    Measure the revenue that can be attributed to leads generated by this specific campaign, which you tracked via your long UTM parameter URL that you built with the Google URL builder, which were then captured by your CRM, from which you can run a simple report that shows total conversions and revenue. This is your return and you should measure it for each individual campaign.
    8. UNDERSTAND YOUR COSTS
    Or “investment” since we’re talking “ROI”. You must know your costs, which include everything above (except revenue), and including “value” if you invested in any social media ads to boost fans and follower numbers. Be transparent in your organization about which costs you are including in your calculation, and make sure you get complete buy-in, so you’re not sandbagging but also not being too conservative in your numbers.
    Do you have all these things? Good! Now you’re ready to do that simple math:
    ROI = (RETURN – INVESTMENT) / INVESTMENT
    Warning: you should only calculate your ROI on social media investment if you want to get a larger budget for next year, because when done right, social media driven by compelling content will win.

  • What the Twitter + Google partnership means to the digital marketer

    Earlier today, my friend and fellow marketer Kevin Ekmark shared this story on Twitter about the renewal of the Twitter-Google partnership. From 2009-2011, Google had access to the Twitter “firehose” of data, but for reasons most of us won’t ever know, that partnership stopped. Then rumors of a rebuilding came about late last year. Now it’s confirmed that “Tweets are now going straight into Google.” What does this statement mean? It means that…

    • all your tweets are indexed in Google’s search engine results in (near) real time; no Google bots that take any time to search and index this content.
    • you can search on any hashtag in Google and see the twitter results
    • all your twitter content is now part of your SEO (or as CopyBlogger says, “OC/DC”) strategy
    • when you search on Google, you can directly access Twitter results, even when you’re not logged into Twitter

    In case you’re wondering, this relationship is a really big deal. Comparing this setup to Facebook’s pretty much closed environment, it means that tweets are now web searchable content. For users and marketers, that means they are much easier to discover on the web. For Twitter, it means that non-twitter users can, and probably will, be exposed to all the content on Twitter and possibly be drawn in to start using the service.

    I’m all for this type of relationship, and there are huge benefits to Twitter, Google, Twitter users, and especially for social and digital marketers. Twitter is now expressly a part of your content marketing strategy and tactics. This subject was a lengthy discussion in our recent Digital Marketing class at GA Atlanta. I have been preaching that social media marketing is content marketing. Yes, there are many one-to-one interactions on Twitter between a brand and its audience, but in every case, the brand’s user representatives should be, must be, and are representing that brand by producing and publishing content, now more than ever, since every brand-customer interaction will be fully searchable on Google.

    And when a brand creates, schedules, and executes a twitter strategy, that is absolutely content marketing. Those who have been doing this already have an advantage over those who consider social networks to be only “social”, and not content marketing.

    Social content is content, and must be an intentional reflection of the values of the brand.

  • Take a Marketing Inventory

    General Assembly published my latest article on their blog today, How to Measure Social Media ROI. That post came from a seminar that we’re now teaching regularly at GA Atlanta, and is a great example of repurposing content from one media to many others. It’s not included in the blog post, but in the class, one of the thought provoking exercises is to take a marketing inventory. It reminds me of the scene in “The Princess Bride” after Inigo and Fezzik have rescued Westley from the pit of despair, fed him Miracle Max’s miracle pill, and Westley wakes up: “What are our assets?”

    Before you begin your content marketing strategy, leading to measuring your social media ROI, take an inventory of the following items.

    • CONTENT: what content do you already have or can you create on a regular, repeatable basis?
    • CHANNELS: what social media or other marketing channels (like email) are already established or would be an obvious good fit?
    • GOALS: do you have marketing or more specific social media goals in place? Some of you are shaking your heads right now, but you’d be shocked at how many business operate with no goals.
    • TRACKING: are there any tracking mechanisms in place, such as UTM parameters in your call to action URLs?
    • MEASURING: what analytics tools are you already using or could you use tomorrow, like Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.?
    • VALUE: have you established a value for each lead, each social media engagement? How much would it be worth if someone retweeted your best piece of content?
    • REVENUE: what is your average sale amount? lifetime value of your customer? average conversion rate? Do you know any of these metrics?
    • COSTS: what are your hard costs (personnel, software, etc.), soft costs, time costs, and sunk costs?

    It’s not a contest to see how many of these you can answer perfectly. Rather, it’s an inventory of what you have, so you can make an intelligent decision on how to proceed. For example, if you have an opt-in email list with 10,000 email addresses, that’s a major asset, even if you have zero presence on social media.

    It’s always good to know your assets and your liabilities, even if you don’t have a holocaust cloak or a wheelbarrow.

  • On smartphones and social media

    Our kids (both 13) do not have smartphones. Yes, I know I’m a freak-parent for this day and age, but I’ll wear that one like a badge of honor. In a recent discussion about my and my wife’s horrible behavior, I was told by a friend as we discussed how much my children have “suffered” under our regime’s tough standards that “there’s nothing wrong with 7th graders having iPhones.” We agreed to disagree, and I continue to hear the moans and groans of my teens as they begrudge me for making them so “different” at school.

    Smartphones and social media in and of themselves are neither good nor bad. It’s what you do with either that can be either good or bad. We’re taking this time to let our kids see how good or bad both can be from the outside looking in as a kind of training before we turn them loose with their own devices.

    In Thursday’s Digital Marketing class at General Assembly, we ended the class with a lesson of sorts, prompted by this blog post, as we contrasted how Arby’s won the 2014 Grammys versus how Justine Sacco’s life was ruined by three tweets to her 170 Twitter followers.

    Notice the engagement on the Arby’s tweet. Amazing. The hat in question later generated thousands of dollars for charity. Wins all around. The power of social media.

    Then the opposite. With three tweets, the last of which was simply extraordinarily offensive on so many different levels, a young lady’s life was changed forever.

    • “ ‘Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant.’ — Inner monologue as I inhale BO. Thank God for pharmaceuticals.”
    • “Chilly — cucumber sandwiches — bad teeth. Back in London!”
    • “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”



    This is the power of social media. Sacco posted these tweets minutes before boarding an 11-hour flight, on which she turned off her phone and had no knowledge that #HasJustineLandedYet had become the top trend worldwide on Twitter.

    You can’t train the wit and excellence that won the Grammys for Arby’s, but you can teach users of social media to think twice, read thrice, and be nice, even when they have only 170 followers on Twitter. We teach that “your brand is everything you do” in this DGM class. In this case, Sacco was employed by IAC, and their brand had to take the heat for Sacco’s actions.

    This is why my kids don’t have iPhones or social media accounts yet. They will someday, but until then, every day is training day.

  • Social Media Strategy Class Recap

    I’ve written before about how we learn more when we teach something.  Last night’s Social Media Strategy Mapping class at General Assembly was no exception for me.  I always learn from those whom I am supposedly teaching, and that is a very good thing.

    Thanks to everyone who attended.  I counted 35 in the audience, which was far more than I had expected, but it shows clearly that, while it’s easy to jump into social media, it’s a bit more complicated to (a) market using social media (b) for your company, and (c) to get it right every time.

    One of the topics that came up was the recent #fail by BestBuy, among others by various airline brands.  The bigger the brand, the harder the social media fail. That’s why you need a strategy and a plan when you engage in social media marketing for your brand.  We went pretty deep last night into how to create your own social media strategy, but here are the highlights.

    1. Define your brand. Atlanta Tech Village is a solid example of how to be intentional about your culture, values, and, hence, your brand. When in doubt, remember the core values of your brand.
    2. Define your audience. You have to know who you’re talking to, who you want to talk to, and where they are engaging in social media.
    3. Evaluate your competition. It’s easier than ever to follow and keep tabs on your competitors these days. Do it. Find out what they’re doing that’s working/not working.
    4. Set realistic goals. You’re not going to get a million followers in the first 12 months, if ever, so set some goals by which you can measure progress.
    5. Map out your approach. That means write it down, and follow it, like a map. There are no shortcuts.
    6. Define success. How will you know if you’ve succeeded? That’s what setting goals is all about.
    7. Measure everything. You cannot change what you do not measure. Measure everything at the start, then you’ll slowly learn the metrics that you need to live by.

    It was a great class, and I look forward to digging deeper into Digital Marketing for the next 10 weeks. Will you join me?